Get To Know BobBentz: President at Purplegator

Get to know Bob Bentz, President at Purplegator

June 27, 2023 | Interview

Bob Bentz is president of Purplegator — a mobile first digital agency located in suburban Philadelphia. He is also the president of Advanced Telecom Services — an IVR service bureau with offices in Philadelphia, London, Toronto, and Prague. Bob is the author of Relevance Raises Response: How to Engage and Acquire with Mobile Marketing. He is an adjunct at the University of Denver where he teaches the graduate level course in mobile marketing.

Please introduce yourself and where you work.

My name is Bob Bentz, I am the president of Purplegator — a mobile first digital agency located in suburban Philadelphia.

How do you think SEO has changed over the last 10 years?

I’ve been involved with SEO for many years and I always tell people that “Google has a lot of smart people.” So, don’t take shortcuts with SEO, unless your business only has a one year window. If that’s the case, then by all means, consider trying to beat the system. But, know that every way to quick rankings is going to be short term gain and will not last forever.

How did you get introduced to digital marketing, more specifically SEO?

I go back to the days when there were people calling the search engines and asking for higher rankings. That was the earliest form of SEO. When SEO became an art, I became very intrigued and studied it every night. The great thing about SEO is that there has always been so much information available online. Add some trade shows to the mix and you can get a quick education on SEO.

What are the services you provide to your clients?

We start by giving away a ranking report online then consult with the client on keyword research and come up with a strategy. That strategy differs based on whether the customer is local, regional, or national and where its strengths and weaknesses are. As an agency, it’s always easier to tackle SEO if the customer is willing to develop a new website, because then we can control the bricks that become part of the building. Often, when the site was developed by another party, they are a bit reluctant to turn over the keys of the website to us so we always prefer to be the ones building the site and adding SEO strategies as we go.

What strategy according to you will prevail in 2017 for SEO?

The importance of video will only continue to increase. People, in general, are inherently lazy and will always watch a video over reading an article. Continue to add video to your sites.

What would your advice be to people who are looking to take up digital marketing as a career choice?

There’s a ton of information online and there’s a lot of very bright people in the business that you can learn from. But, at the end of the day, no SEO provider is going to share his/her special sauce so you need to find your own. That’s where you really need to have analytical skills too so you can analyze results and do A-B and multivariate testing. If you hate math, SEO is not the right choice for your career!